From Curator Tom Cugliani

“The subject of Time and space is of eternal interest to the creative imagination.

And to the scientist who measures distances in light-years.

In [R]evolution, time has been interpreted in a number of ways that do not conform to the convention of metrics. Neither the strictly cyclic, as present in nature, nor the linear, as present in the calendar, suffices to gauge passing time.

Jessamyn Go has abstracted time into ceramic deformities of the clock face. As in the paintings of the surrealist Salvador Dalì, Go’s representations seem to collapse under the weight of the real. Each sculpture is constructed from the same model and is based on the number twelve – for the hours of the day and the months of the year. Arranged like the comb of a honeybee, the forms do not stand up to pressure; they melt like wax.

The artist’s sculpture also seems to refer to the human skeleton – a distribution of bones that demonstrably changes, at first microscopically, then progressively, then in compression; a distortion that takes place over a lifetime. Curiously, the arc of cognitive evolution bends to a circle, starting and circling back to a state of infancy.

The time expressed across life here holds a dimensionality that cannot be captured in snapshots of birthdays and New Year’s. It exists in surreal spaces without contours. Some of Jessamyn Go’s pieces are completed when reflected like an image in the mirror, or on the surface of the water. Other shapes gain substantiation when struck by refracted light, but dematerialize with the passing of a cloud. Time in the artistic imagination can be abstracted from the continuum of space once it is freed from the moorings of the conventional.

Whether floating or fleeting, the time of art here is an elegant projection of what is elevated beyond the physical, and for which there is no calculus.”

- Tom Cugliani